5 thoughts on “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sexism in the Film Industry”

As is so often the case with infographics, this actually says almost nothing that one would ever want to know about sexism in the film industry. There’s no couching of statistics on context, or acknowledgement of compounding of factors (if all the directors are men, should we be surprised that women aren’t nominated for awards?).

The interesting questions are not ‘how much?’, but ‘why?’. Is there a bias against women cinematographers? Is the reason technical or artistic? Do male and female cinematographers produce clearly different results, with current fashions perhaps preferring the male one? But no, let’s just put some statistics up and boo! Boo!

@AstroKenty Agreed that why is the important question, second only to, how do we change this? However, stats are tools and it is often useful to have them. Especially in the day of the internent, it helps to have the “how much?” to explain why you are asking the why?”.

On another note, race is not touched on here at all, which is a shame. I think it would be interesting to see the statistics comparing white women to WOC, especially about the speaking roles and the nudity.

.. with a 4% increase in the number of women directors responsible for the top grossing movies in 2012 (9% compare to 5%)…

What ??? 5% of the 250 = 25 movies 9% of the of the 250 = 45 movies

or to put it another way there has been a 80% increase !!! This should surely be shouted from the rooftops as a stunning change towards equality in a clearly very sexist industry, Of course, being a misleading infographic, there are no figure for 2010, 2009 to show if this a trend or not. A two second google shows that they have naturally picked a ‘low’ year as the starting point since in 2010 there were more female directors of the top 250 than in 2011.

However, it’s still really misleading as it talks about top 250 grossing films… i,e, the ones people paid to see, You can hardly blame the industry for people not wanting to watch female directed films. Perhaps you could argue about marketing and production budget and of course probably most important of all the subject of the film… but this article makes no mention of that,

Actually that’s what I would like to see – a like for like comparison of male vs female directed films. Are most female directed films already gender sterotyped about love, romance and relationships vs big budget male directed films about action or high drama ? Do female directors never touch or are excluded from the big action budget films in the first place ?

However, I guess that would involve real research of asking directors about their industry, quick infographic from information quickly grabbed via google.

Ok so there are some problems with this infographic, but surely it is the fact that only 30% of speaking roles are female, or how (comparitively) little the highest paid actresses make which we should be thinking about. An 80% increase in female directing of top grossing films still leaves us at 9%. maybe not everyone is interested in statistically how much inequality there is in Hollywood, but I certainly am. And I hardly think the reason is because of some abstract industry ‘current’ taste for male style, as if there used to be a flourishing culture for female cinematographers. These statistics highlight something incredibly important that very few people are actively aware of, despite the popularity of cinema in general. Attacking something so obviously designed to expose institutionalised sexism because it’s not 100% effective in explaining the reasons for these changes is a misguided expenditure of effort in my opinion